Encinitas State of the City Address set for March 26

ENCINITAS — Encinitas Mayor Catherine Blakespear is set to give the annual State of the City Address on March 26th at the Encinitas Community Center.

Blakespear’s speech is the keynote address for the event, hosted by the Encinitas Chamber of Commerce, which also features business networking, heavy hors d’oeuvres and a general speech about the community in general.

For Blakespear, recently elected to her second term as mayor, this will be her third state of the city address.

The event begins at 5:30 p.m., with Blakespear’s speech set for 7:30 p.m. The Encinitas Community Center is located at 1140 Oakcrest Park Drive.

1 comment

taxpayerconcernsMarch 11, 2019 at 1:37 pm

At this Chamber of Commerce meeting does Mayor Blakespear plan to tell everyone how she and the Council plan to take away the voters’ rights of Prop A to vote on increasing density and building height within the city?

The Mayor and Council aren’t telling the full story on what they plan to do to Encinitas if they can invalidate Prop A. Will they tell it at the state of the city to the paying crowd?

One of the statement of purposes and intent of Prop A is to protect the Encinitas natural resources such as lagoons, watershed, riparian, wildlife habitat, natural vegetation, bluffs, and hillsides. Prop A also helps insure that infrastructure and public benefits, such as schools, parks, roads, sewer, and water facilities, are adequately planned and funded prior to approving any increase in zoning.

The Encinitas City Council wants to do away with those protections and needs the demands from the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) to destroy the voters rights under Prop A. This Council and previous Councils disliked losing their super majority vote where 4 of 5 Council members yes votes could override any opposition to increases in density and building heights for the benefit of developers. HCD ordered Prop A to be amended or invalidated and offered no discussion of the harm to the natural resources or the new burden on infrastructure, schools, and other public benefits.

The February 4, 2019 letter from HCD had more demands that were citywide and would be very beneficial for developers but detrimental to neighborhoods. The HCD demands of February 4 followed what developers had requested of HCD staff – increased heights above what was in Measure U, more density allowed than what was in Measure U, and other changes to the programs and policies in the Housing Element that weren’t in Measure U. The previous Measure T was a goldmine for developer lawsuits because the city added at least 10 new program promises that weren’t required by housing law but could be used as the basis for lawsuits. The housing element must be rewritten.

There is also the question of why HCD has approved other housing elements from other cities where their required number of low income houses is two. Beverly Hills, Malibu, Laguna Beach, Costa Mesa, Hermosa Beach, Compton, Newport Beach only need to build 2 low income houses each. Encinitas must build 1,033 low income houses. These other cities are in the SCAG region. Many more cities in that region have far lower housing numbers than Encinitas. Mayor Blakespear doesn’t consider the vast difference in the mandated housing numbers to be important.
Does Mayor Blakespear’s family own some land that will benefit from the HCD changes and Measures U and T if this new Encinitas 2019 housing element update become the law in Encinitas?